> well, i say "modules", but of course the language pre-dates > them. people pretend. it uses import/export tables with type signatures. > those are stashed in the a.out (viz. DYN_MAGIC in a.out.h) > so they stay together.
It's not what the OP suggested. Nor are Nemo's reservation valid. We're talking about loading source modules into an interpreter. This means that different modules may be loaded, sometimes even by the same instruction and that libraries are not terribly significant unless the invoker gets the sequence wrong, which is a programming error. The remaining reservation is security, can somebody replace a module with a Trojan horse? In Plan 9 the risk is much smaller, I dare not say non-existent. Recent instances of the Korn shell have this feature. Bolsky and Korn describe these features in some details in "The New Korn Shell", 1995. ++L
